Press Freedom and News Credibility
Press freedom is a sacred matter, but this case illustrates that "official news agencies" cannot be a reliable source of news, since it is evident that the high EU official Mogherini could not simultaneously have had two different positions on one issue.
"Mogherini: EU expects Kyiv to grant autonomy to Donbas" [1]
24 November 2014, 22:11. TvNet citing LETA - TV Dozhd, Apollo, Diena citing LETA
"Mogherini's press service denies statements on autonomy for Donbas" [2]
25 November 2014, 08:07. TvNet citing LETA - Ukrainska Pravda
Article 29 of the Law "On the Press and Other Mass Media" provides that mass media are not liable for the dissemination of false information if it is contained in reports from official news agencies. Article 2 of the same law provides that a website is NOT a mass medium, but may be registered as one.
In the NEPLP's response letter of 16 September 2014, A. Dimants explains that the Council's competence covers only the supervision of mass media that distribute audiovisual programmes.
The 2012 report "News in Public Television: Generational and Ethnic (Linguistic) Group News Media Choices in Latvia" [3] shows that the Internet as the main source of (world) news is used by 30.2% of respondents, leaving radio and the press behind, while Television accounts for 56%. Meanwhile, it is a significant source of (world) news for 52.4% of respondents.
News on internet portals is published as a discrete unit of information, characterised by publication time, URL address, headline and body text. Reading the aforementioned news items independently of one another, one cannot conclude that one is a supplement to the previous item or that one follows from the other. Moreover, both items were sourced from an "official news agency", and therefore one cannot claim that any news item is false, even though in its message it contains a completely contradictory message.
From the reader's (information recipient's) perspective, the news flow cannot be considered a continuous stream, since it would be wrong to assume that the reader reads absolutely all the news, let alone that the reader remembers all previously read news. In the cited case, the reader might have read, for example, only the first item and arrived at a possibly erroneous conclusion about the EU's position.
Press freedom is a sacred matter, but this case illustrates that "official news agencies" cannot be a reliable source of news, since it is evident that the high EU official Mogherini could not simultaneously have had two different positions on one issue. As the news came from LETA, it cannot be considered that these news items are someone's interpretation or opinion, since this person is not known, and therefore it is not possible to assess their competence and the credibility of their opinion.
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